...would need private-industry partners, those people said, in order to avoid weighing down the government with costs. That got Mr. Trump’s attention. The president-elect turned to the other people in the room—his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon; his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and Steven T. Mnuchin, his campaign’s chief fund-raiser and Mr. Trump’s nominee to be Treasury secretary—surprised that his infrastructure ideas had such a potential downside. “Is this true?” Mr. Trump asked the group, according to those people. Heads nodded. “Why did I have to wait to have this guy tell me?” he demanded.

This is what my late coauthor Susan Rasky called a "beat sweetener".
In one paragraph, Kate Kelly has claimed that:

Gary Cohn is brave.

Gary Cohn is willing to tell the president important truths that nobody else--not even his son-in-law and the future Treasury Secretary--will tell him.

President Trump trusts Gary Cohn.

President Trump believes Gary Cohn.

Such beat sweeteners appear when their subject inside the White House:

wants to demonstrate that he was won the struggle for the President's ear and trust that is at the heart of power within the imperial court's inner circle.

wants to claim that he has won the the struggle as a move in the struggle for influence and authority with those outside the imperial court's inner circle--and to aid him in his struggle.

wants to have journalists claim that he was a powerful member of his inner circle to aid his post-administration career.

(more rarely) a journalist thinks the courtier will be pleased by this message getting out.

This requires a complaisant journalist (or a journalist who thinks they are being complaisant by getting this message out).

But is any of it true?

Put it this way: I have never had anybody else who was present at a meeting portrayed this way in a beat sweetener do anything other than snort and laugh at how they--and the President--are depicted here.

You are much better off taking stories like this as social rituals than as anything like the products of any disinterested information intermediary. IIRC, there had been a bunch of discussion about the form that Trump's now-stillborn infrastructure push would take--including much discussion of private-public partnerships--before Gary Cohn showed up on the scene...

Related

Two days after democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin sent a letter to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, asking if Goldman effectively runs the country through its extensive alumni links at the Trump administration, and requesting details on "lobbying" activities in the bank related to review of the Dodd-Frank Act and the Obama-era fiduciary rule on financial advice, as well as asking for any communication between the bank's employees and Cohn, Mnuchin, nominee for the S

Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Steven Mnuchin said Donald Trump plans to nominate him as the next U.S. Treasury secretary, a key cabinet decision as the president-elect assembles a team to fulfill his campaign pledge to boost the world’s largest economy.
Mnuchin confirmed his selection for the Cabinet in an interview Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” program. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross also confirmed on the cable network that Trump will nominate him as Commerce secretary.

NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump appointed his influential son-in-law Jared Kushner as a White House senior adviser Monday, putting the young real estate executive in position to exert broad sway over both domestic and foreign policy, particularly Middle East issues and trade negotiations.

As if the flow of news on this warm September weekend wasn’t hectic enough thanks to President Trump’s decision to pick a fight with professional sports, Politico is out with the latest bombshell report alleging some nefarious act was committed by one of Trump’s closest advisors, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

For Trump's two main White House policy advisors (aside from Goldman Sachs, of course) chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the confusion over the "orb" event may have been too great.
For clarification, this is not a Satanic ritual. pic.twitter.com/CccP39fqN4
— The Church Of Satan (@ChurchofSatan) May 22, 2017

MSNBCJoe Scarborough cast doubt Wednesday over whether President-elect Donald Trump's nominees to lead the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce would bring the populist economic reforms that Trump promised during the campaign.

WASHINGTON — Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of president-elect Donald Trump, has spoken to a lawyer about the possibility of joining the new administration, a move that could violate federal anti-nepotism law and risk legal challenges and political backlash.